Quacking for Dollars; Our View; 'Duck Dynasty' as a School Funding Strategy? Missouri's New Reality

Quacking for Dollars; Our View; 'Duck Dynasty' as a School Funding Strategy? Missouri's New Reality

Article excerpt

Part of Missouri's strategy for funding schools next year is to
hope that enough gamblers in Missouri can be lured by marketing tied
to a hot new reality TV show or a nearly 30-year-old Bill Murray
movie.

We are not making this up.

In the last legislative session, Missouri lawmakers made their
budget numbers work in part by giving the Missouri Lottery an extra
$4 million to pump up its advertising efforts. The goal is for
lottery sales to hit records in the current fiscal year and transfer
just under $300 million to schools. Lottery officials are really
hoping that new promotions tied to the 1984 movie "Ghostbusters" and
the current reality hit "Duck Dynasty" turn the numbers in their
favor.

Keep in mind, even with that money, the Legislature passed a
budget for K-12 education that is $600 million below the levels
state law calls for in the funding formula rewritten in 2005.

In the first three months of the current fiscal year, the lottery
transfers have fallen $5 million short, the Post-Dispatch's
Elizabeth Crisp reported last week.

That's bad news, particularly when contrasted with last week's
meeting of the state Board of Education, in which the board voted to
ask the Legislature for an additional $6.8 million in emergency
funds to keep the Normandy School District solvent, as it struggles
to pay tuition and transportation costs for hundreds of its students
who are now attending neighboring school districts.

The transfer crisis highlights numerous problems with how schools
are funded in Missouri.

First, because lawmakers have underfunded the formula, state
officials have taken money from most districts, including Normandy,
to try to balance out costs as called for in state law.

Second, the formula, despite its best efforts, creates an unfair
playing field where students in wealthier districts receive unequal
educational opportunity because their parents are able to afford
higher property taxes, thus giving them advantages over other school
districts.

Finally, those higher property taxes create a reality now in play
in the transfer crisis where poor districts such as Normandy are now
paying more to send their students to surrounding districts than
they were paying to educate them at home. …